INTRODUCTION

Bioinformatics is the merging of computer, information technology and molecular biology. It deals with genetic sequences and database of this sequences, and making sense of such information through a computer processing. Bioinformatics is a new field that arises mostly because of the sequencing of the genome of many organisms including us, humans, rice, Arabidopsis, Drosophila etc. Most of the databases and bioinformatics tools that crop up out of this are freely available on the web yet in the Philippines we do not have enough pool of bioinformatics expert to take advantage of this information.

The question that this project will address is: how do we go about fast-tracking access to these free bioinformatics tools and web-based resources and present them to prospective users in such a way that it is user-friendly even for beginners. In here, we proposed a needs-based approach which is based on the needs and perspective of the prospective beginning user.

The proposed needs-based approach will go something like, “if this is what you want to do, these are the bioinformatics tools you will need and here’s how to do it”. It’s a problem and solution-based approach to commonly encountered bioinformatics questions in the lab. In some way, it is like an indexing/cataloguing of bioinformatic free software and web-based resources based on some predetermined bioinformatics objective/ aim/ purpose/ function/ query/utility/need or method.